‘Skirts and blouses and jackets of satin or flowered cloth, Balkan decorations, old beads, capes, shawls, earrings.’ At moments, with adjectives and attitude, Sleepless Nights resembles a Manhattan version of that. It was a vast sheet of paper, about the proportions of A4, listing every noun in War and Peace. There was an artwork I once saw, in the reception of Penguin Books. Often Elizabeth Hardwick writes by compiling list after list of objects or attributes. This is a companion piece to Frank O’Hara’s poem ‘The Day Lady Died’. She was never at any hour of the day or night free of these consumptions, never except when she was asleep.’ Onto the heaviest addiction to heroin, she piled up the rocks of her tomb with a prodigiousness of Scotch and brandy. Her ruthless talent and the opulent devastation. For the grand destruction one must be worthy. Part Three, about Billie Holiday is one of the best written portraits I’ve ever read. What flows within the book takes place as set pieces. ‘Everything has come to me and been taken from me because of moving from place to place.’ And there are many sentences where you stop and think, ‘That couldn’t be bettered.’ Even when they seem not to connect with what goes before or after. For the tone of the book, nothing could be more accurate than ‘the jangle of carelessness at a distance’. That’s an encapsulation, offered by Hardwick, on the penultimate page. Yet, why is it that we cannot keep the note of irony, the jangle of carelessness at a distance? Sentence in which I have tried for a certain light tone – many of those have to do with events, upheavals, destructions that caused me to weep like a child.’ ‘Oh, M., when I think of the people I have buried, North and South. She makes of her little more than enough. She looks well, and she writes even better. It is about a writer looking and writing. If it’s a novel, it doesn’t concern itself with a central character’s gradual development. I wouldn’t say it’s fragmented so much as not assembled. (Particularly Part Nine, which deals with Josette and Ida and Angela, Hardwick’s – as far as I can tell – cleaning ladies.) And Woolf’s diaries are one of my favourite books to go back to. Woolf’s diaries are the closest thing I’ve read to Sleepless Nights. Elizabeth Hardwick is an America Virginia Woolf, concerned with peripheries and with making them near-central. I am sure I did not find this novel – and the presence in it of Elizabeth Hardwick – as endearing as some readers will do.
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